#flophouse

Residents of a flophouse on the Bowery tidy themselves up for a cruise aboard the S.S. Delaware on Long Island Sound, July 21, 1936, courtesy of the Bowery Mission.

Need a cheap place to stay while you get back on your feet? Look no further than Simney's Flophouse! (Yes, this is like the 5th one I've built...)

Amenities/Features

This flophouse sits on a 30x20 lot and costs §37,421. I tried to keep the price relatively cheap, especially for the players like me who play with a neighborhood treasury/tax system. This lot comes in two versions: apartment and residential. On the apartment lot, rent is estimated to be around §65-§95.

This lot includes:

4 cheap rooms (2 can fit a double bed)

Communal bathroom with 2 showers and 2 stalls

Commons area with TV, couches, and a desk

Lobby with a computer

Sizeable kitchen with cafeteria worker (optional)

Outdoor seating area

Requirements

CC - The only thing you’ll need for this lot to look exactly as it does above is the Life Stories build set found here. Without this set, you’ll only need to replace the exterior wall coverings.

Packs - I tried to stick with mostly the base game and University when building this lot. Obviously, Apartment Life will be required for the apartment lot.

Recommendations

Shiny Tyme NPC Everywhere Patch - An override patch to the Shyne Tyme dorm cooktop. Whatever lot type you place this in, it will get an NPC cook working just like they do on dorm lots.

Download (Residential Lot)

Download (Apartment Lot)

Flophouse - Right Now (1991)

J.C. Hopkins and Flophouse started off more as an early Dylan style folk group before transforming themselves into the noisy indie rock group you hear on this tune. Later, J.C. left San Francisco for New York and started playing more jazz oriented stuff with the J.C. Hopkins Biggish Band. Quite a bit of genre jumping but you can't deny the talent.

RECORD OF THE WEEK: “Steinbeck Found the Valley”—On this month in 1937, John Steinbeck published his touchstone book, OF MICE & MEN, the oft-retold novel which has been made into films and plays. For me, Steinbeck is "pure California." Of his writing he said, “These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.”

My composition “Steinbeck Found the Valley” is an “Americana instrumental,” prompted by a lyric from The Beach Boys's "California Saga": "Have you ever been down Salinas way where Steinbeck found the valley, and he wrote about the way it was, and his travellings with Charley..." The music bed was inspired by an obscure Beach Boys instrumental called “Trombone Dixie” (from the PET SOUNDS sessions). On this track I played accordion and piano with cellist Kim Osterwalder (from the band Flophouse; she also gigged with mutual friends, Buddy & Julie Miller) + trombonist Richard Marriott, who improvised his parts in two takes. Richard is an accomplished composer and veteran of big bands, orchestras, fringe music, and film soundtracks (check out his site http://www.richardmarriott.com).

https://johnnyjblairsingeratlarge.bandcamp.com/track/steinbeck-found-the-valley